A client wanted to investigate ways to add physical interactivity to their multimedia software projects. I developed a system to connect Arcade-style buttons to a computer using an Arduino. This approach allows for future flexibility to add additional input devices like motion sensors.

The circuitry was similar to what I did last quarter for my Sensors class. The client has many pre-built multimedia applications that respond to keyboard presses so the desire was for the button system to generate native keyboard presses so they would not have to modify their software.

I wrote the software in Java using the Processing.org framework. Processing has an Arduino library that makes it easy to interact with the hardware inputs and outputs. I used the Java Robot class to generate the keypresses.